Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Thursday July 18, 2002 @02:51PM
from the state-of-the-lindustry dept.

Werner Heuser writes "At MobiliX there is a survey of app. 100 laptop manufacturers and their Linux status available now. It contains a list of manufacturers, which are the most popular with Linux users. And some criticism about misleading manufacturer announcements for Linux support. The survey finishes with hints to laptop certifications, independent vendors and how to get rid of the "Microsoft Tax". And finally there is a A-Z list of almost 100 manufacturers and their Linux status. Besides Linux also other UniXes are mentioned and some hints about laptops with other CPUs than from Intel are included."

I have a dell Inspiron 2600. I wanted to run FreeBSD on it, but had to settle for Linux (no trolling intended) because it plain just wouldn't boot. However, I cannot get XFree86 working properly on it. It seems that it is the fault of the video card (intel i830M) uses system memory and "steals" it. Well, suffice it to say, it doesn't work perfectly. I can only get 1MB of video memory (the default).

There is a workaround here [jongans.com]. (for a different laptop, but same video card). Damn it, if Dell would just fucking fix their bios to allow more "stolen" memory everything would be find. Chalk one up for corporate stupidity. Its an easy fix, and they choose not to do it. Fuck you dell.

(I am now a disgruntled dell owner that is kicking himself for not doing more research)

"Hmmmm, is it just me or does it seem like slashdot is begining to report more and more on almost usless news from sites that just so happen to sell things."

Someone managed to get their advertisement posted on the front page of slashdot, probably for free. Look at the link on the story reporter's name: It is the same as the site with the so-called survey of linux laptop machines. Essentially, the guy wanted to do some self promotion and the slashdot editors fell for it (or were paid to get into it.)

"Essentially, the guy wanted to do some self promotion and the slashdot editors fell for it (or were paid to get into it.)"

I don't understand how anybody 'fell' for it. Self promotion? Big deal! If it's info people are interested in, great. Who cares who submitted it? It's a little different than being paid to endorse collect calls.

Maybe I'm missing something, but that page seems almost entirely devoid of content. There's a list of manufacturer's sales blurbs (much of it vapor) and list of laptop makers and their URLs, with esssentially no original information except for a line telling you not to go to some other site.

Yes it is pretty good page, but author has not updated since March 2002 (5 Months) i have personally reported a couple new pages that are waiting for a long time to be updated. Please Kenneth E. Harker (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/) update it!!

Unfortunately you are correct. There is nothing there. It would be much more beneficial to keep a list of configuration settings required for the different laptops rather than just keeping a list of companies that sell them!

I recently was given a Dell Inspiron 2650 and installed linux on it. Because it is a new design my linux distro. was not able to figure out what to do about the display. I ended up fiddling around with Xconfigurator until it worked. Dell wasn't much help, and I could not find anything on the web.

It works fine, but it was more of an inconvenience than it really needed to be. It would have been a much better experience had there been a place on the web that listed all of the configurations necessary for the different types of machines. Simply having a list of companies tells you nothing about installing linux on a particular machine!

There's a list of manufacturer's sales blurbs (much of it vapor) and list of laptop makers and their URLs, with esssentially no original information except for a line telling you not to go to some other site.

And at least one of them isn't a link to a laptop maker, but to a producer of bee-pollen supplements.

I'm wondering where they got their list of computer manufacturers. They included Commodore, who has been out of business for a decade! Other companies they list that no longer exist or no longer make (laptop) PCs are CompuAdd, Escom, Hunday, TI, AST, Digital, Quantex, and Zenith. I'm sure there are more in the list. This is just pitiful -- one of the most useless pieces of mis-information I've seen on the Web.

But ok alot and I mean alot of the *nix users are techies or are heavy in the computer field. And if you really know anything about computers it is usually cheaper and better if you buy a barebone system with no OS on it so why would you mass produce systems with a *nix OS on it when alot of the pubic *nix users don't by prebuilts? Correct me if I am wrong, please, as I see it there really isn't that great of demand for any *nix OS'on prebuilts.

Personaly I have never bought a pre-built system. I also haven't run a MS operating system since 1996, but that is me. When it comes to laptops, you realy don't have any choice in the matter (as far as I know), well that's not entirely true, you can buy a lunchbox case if you want to build muscles, but I think that's about it.

The article is on laptops not desktops. I feel safe in guessing 99% percent of laptop users bought a prebuilt system. When you're putting Linux/BSD on a laptop, you want don't want a barebones system. You want a decent and popular system that might even have manufacturer support.

There is a major need for *nix on pre-builts. here are a couple of reasons:

Installing an OS on a system lets you know that the hardware does work, i.e. eLinux.com [elinux.com] does a manual install on all linux boxes to make sure components work

If you are going to throw an OS on a pre-built system, might as well be a real OS like linux

If there are not pre-built linux boxes on the shelves at your computer stores, only the adventurous and the geeks will be running linux, and M$ will still be the supreme dominant on desktops, and who wants that

If we want to see a more broad adoption of linux, it needs to be easy for your adverage consumer to get an run. I don't particulary like Lindows, but I love the concept, as it will help bring more people into the fold and increase the use of linux in the overall marketplace.

Many people have to e guided, even wal-mart understands this, hence their new line of linux boxes, so why shouldn't the linux world be the ones to do the guiding. Let's face it folks, if it is not us doing the guiding, it will be the evil empire of gates.

Although it is great to see large companies supporting Linux on their platforms, I think in the end, the best support would come from local companies. For people who are not fluent with Linux, it would be hard for a large comany to even support them. But if they had a setup, in which smaller vendors could carry, sell, and support their products, specifically a Linux program, they could target smaller groups of people more efficiently. Smaller, more tagerted support would greatly help increase the abilities to integrate Linux into the everyday computer environment.

All there is to see here is some guy's web analysis of what type of laptop people on his site search for.

There's a link to the now archaic windows refund site. There's a few blurbs about laptop companies that abandoned linux over the past few years. Finally there are some links to laptop manufacters and related open source projects.

Nothing really special, and nothing that isn't presented elsewhere in a cleaner, more useful format. Good "web-ring" material.

The "report card" seems to be missing an important aspect: namely, grades! There's nothing here that indicates how "friendly" a company or laptop is toward Linux. This looks more like an attempt to boost page views; or maybe stress-test the server?:) :Peter

The top 20 list admits to being flawed, and the data there is pretty scarce, hardly a story.

To be on topic, I'm using a little Presario 725US w/ 1.4 GHz. Athlon. Pretty good price/performance, and works well with linux out of the box...

Of course, to get the most out of it, I have patched the kernel for PowerNow and ACPI, to extend battery life, reduce heat, and lower fan noise. Also applied a 'kacpid' patch to kernel to recover lost acpi interrupts. Because it has no builtin support for suspend, I also have the swsup patch applied. The sound also required a patch to actually work. The savage chipset driver with XFree I replaced with a more up-to-date version with better performance, but no matter what the driver locks up when xv attributes are set, so I have to patch xine to run it and RealOne is out of the question...

Ok, so it isn't *that* great out of the box but it was a hell of a lot cheaper than the competition out there and the end result is a solid system, at a price of 1200 new (at the time, after rebate).

Same thing happened with me, but I just knew some issues to twek, the exception being of course the XV atribute lockup which would bite people in the ass, but the opther stuff an 'average' user might not ever notice.

I have never ever had an AMD CPU go bad, this FUD annoys me. I've had models from their 286 way back when, to the Athlon XP, and not one of them ever showed a hint of a problem. The K6 series underperformed, but still ran solid as could be... More than I can say for the two intel processors I bought, one which had the fdiv bug and the other which had the F00F bug.... I know, two exceptions to intel quality, but don't pretend AMD is a piece of crap while glossing over Intel's flaws..

IBM, Dell announcing Linux laptops and then not offering them (or scaling it back?) sounds like a dot-bomb adjustment. Makes sense for them to focus on the big volume money making Windoze set, particularly being a known market, in uncertain times.

If Dell's still offering Linux as a custom install, and Wallmart is advertising Mandrake/Lwindows (desktops) on there front page rather than Windoze systems, not all is lost.

It's a shame that the only places that sell laptops/notebooks pre-loaded with Linux charge an arm and a leg for them - I mean, there's nothing under $2000 at EmperorLinux.com. You'd think there would be some money in buying some less-expensive laptops sans OS at wholesale (from Asus, perhaps) and then undercutting the competition by saving money on the OS. Even if this means no (win)modem, I don't see it as a huge deal.

I just see some money in the ~500mhz for $600 market. Desktops really started to take off at that price point - perhaps laptops will do the same, even at the reduced performance?

Emperor Linux does not work in that market though. The people that come to them want new machines with good warranties. Who wants an old laptop with no warranty? The kind of people who would install linux themselves on that machine.

Hmm, those still start at about $1K which is roughly what I can get buying the base model at Fry's or BestBuy. Or for example, Gateway and Dell have one for $999 right now. And with these I'm going to be paying for a superfluous copy of Windows.

The site you linked to gives the option of adding on Windows XP Home for $75 and XP Professional for $145. If that's average, it seems like a base model OS-less 14" 1GHz PIII 128MB 10GB HD laptop should start at about $900.

I have a Sony Vaio PCG-FXA35, with the AMD 1.0GHz chip in it . Absolutely wonderful Linux notebook, with one exception: the battery life is 30 minutes *or less* when running Linux...which pretty much means it has to be plugged in all the time.

The source of the problem, as far as I can tell, is the lack of Linux support for ACPI, which appears to be the successor to APM. The laptop has no power management configurability in the BIOS, it all must be done in software. There is no Linux software that I know of that will do this, and altering settings in WinXP appears to only affect the power usage when running WinXP.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd most appreciate hearing them. At this point though, I think my next laptop will be a Titanium powerbook, as they appear to have pretty good Java support, 5 hrs of battery life, instant-on/off, and run a BSD-based OS.

And there is something called date and a derivative workd called outdated:

Linux ACPI-HOWTOv 0.1e, 22 January 2001

Seriously, this HOWTO is pretty obsolete and the ACPI support has changed a lot from that time. I was following the ACPI-devel list on SourceForge some months ago, and this is a known fact (although I can't understand why nobody updated it yet; they are probably waiting for the driver to be more stable).

As others have noted ACPI support is coming along, and I've even read of people having success with your laptop. But even without it there is a tool called lvcool out there which will put your machine into the idle state when you're not compiling or anything. This should help your battery life a little. The best thing is to get a secondary battery since the FX[A] series is made to carry two.

Anyways, I have a Fujitsu-Siemens C Series laptop bought in Germany a year and a half ago (Celeron 450 Mhz, 192 MB RAM). I still use it as my main computer at home and work running only Linux. I have installed almost every flavor of linux and works perfectly, but lately have only used Mandrake: easy install and autodetects everything, from sound card to video, modem and ethernet card.

Even if it is almost two years old it works like the first day with Mandrake 8.1, KDE 3.0 and Forte & Eclipse (and i have dropped it to the floor twice). I even run JBoss in the background while working with Eorte or Eclipse and it runs perfect. No slowdown. If I were a XP or 2000 user this machine would have gone the trash way a long time ago. God bless linux.

I Must recommend this laptop as one of the bests I have seen, and when I buy a new one next month I'm gonna get a Fujitsu-Siemens.

But if you avoid the Windows license fee, then you are violating the contract among you, M$, and the laptop manufacturer [and] subverting the law

What the fuck are you talking about. I didn't sign any contract, and there sure as hell not be any laws requiring MS products to be sold with every laptop. If the OEM sells me a laptop without an OS in violation of a contract they signed, that's their business.

But if you avoid the Windows license fee, then you are violating the contract among you, M$, and the laptop manufacturer. We need to fight the common media portrayal of Linux users as evil pirates and hackers, and publishing instructions for subverting the law is step in the wrong direction.

Huh? What's illegal about installing another OS without booting Windows and asking for a refund of the unused Microsoft OS? I'm also curious as to how the act of buying a laptop can possibly create a "contract" between the buyer and Microsoft.

and getting a Thinkpad. I was saddened to see that IBM doesn't directly support Linux on a laptop anymore. I don't think this market is very popular in general, even though the possible hardware variations are far smaller than in desktops and there fore easier to support.

I don't have an A31p, but have had Debian (stable), various RedHats (7.x+) and a couple of Mandrakes (8.x+) running on an A21p. I'm running RedHat 7.3 right now with no problems.

To qualify that though, I must admit that I don't use the modem for anything, so I don't know if it works under Linux. I've got the mini-PCI 10/100 ethernet card that works just fine.

The Cirrus CS4297A audio works fine.

The video on the A21p is an ATI Mobility M3 and works fine at 1600x1200x32. The A32p uses an ATI Mobility FireGL with which I have no experience.

I also have a CompactFlash pc-card adapter and a usb wireless keyboard/mouse that work fine.

The A21p has S-Video in and out, but I have not had the chance to ever try this stuff on Linux.

So, overall, I am very pleased with Linux on the Thinkpad A21p. I expect the same of an A31p, but I won't ever see one. I have to hang on to this machine for another year. Then, who knows what will be available.

BTW, the IBM Travelstar 32GB drive in my A21p recently died. IBM replaced it with no questions. They overnighted me a 48GB drive and the warranty covered it all (as it should). Forunately, I had very recent backups.

I always had more respect (well, a little more for Apple than Microsoft) as they seemed to value the user community a bit: Open Source Core, Excellent Unix type OS, Amazing GUI system, good high quality hardware.

But I've been evaluating the options recently, and I realised that with a good quality x86 system- I have never had bad experiences or heard of many with IBM- I get a lot more performance for a lot less money. Not only this but the software options are much bigger.

In spite of this I wanted a TiPB. But Apple's Microsoft kind of action with the $100.Mac fiasco day before yesterday finally tipped me. I'll be buying a Thinkpad A31 with Win2000 and RedHat.

It just provides me with greater value, as I see it, although I'll still be pining for a TIPB and OSX.

I've been lusting after a number of tiny sub-notebooks for a while now. But I'm too afraid to pay $1600US for a laptop when I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get it to work very will with the Linux kernel.

Can I expect to be able to return the laptop (with the hard drive in some sort of pseudo-penguined state)? The "terms and conditions" I'vebeen reading on online-store sites seem pretty unfriendly - stuff about having to ask for the seller's permission (Return MaterialAuthorization) to return an item, and promises that the seller will keep some of my money if they decide I've "abused" their product.

Linux-on-laptops sites like www.linux-laptop.net give me some confidence, but the models they list are often older than the newer models I see on sale. What if the newer models have some sort of fatal show-stopping quirk? I don't have money to burn, and I don't want to be stuck with a laptop that runs only windoz.

Is there a way I can put money down on a tiny Fujitsu or Sony sub-notebook, try to put Debian GNU/Linux on it, and then return it for a full refund if I fail?

Sure most of them come with a restore disk these days so you should be able to put it back should you fail. Also I would buy froma local vendor if I thought I was going to be taking it back most of them have good policies.

But I'm too afraid to pay $1600US for a laptop when I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get it to work very will with the Linux kernel.

This very thing happened to me. I was new to installing Linux in late 1999, had no idea what the issues might be. I spent about a month reading as much as I could about laptop models, from manufacturer brochures to the various difficult-to-read "linux on laptops" pages. (They were clearly more oriented to people who already knew what to do and how to do it.)

I ended up settling on a Compaq Presario 1925, for which someone had posted what appeared to be pretty clear directions for getting Linux installed. Then I went to the store, where they had a 1930, bigger hard disk and DVD, and the guy offered me the same price. I was no fool, right?

Turns out that what wasn't in the brochure was a video chip "upgrade" in the 1925 to the 1930 to a chip that had no XFree86 drivers. Took an MIS manager friend of mine a couple days to figure out what happened.

D'oh!

Rather than return the laptop, though, I waited for a new driver to be released. Two months later, there it was. The thing's been a dream since. (I have it dual-boot with the original Win98 because I need Win98 for my employer's software.)

Is there a way I can put money down on a tiny Fujitsu or Sony sub-notebook, try to put Debian GNU/Linux on it, and then return it for a full refund if I fail?

I just bought an HP zt1175 from Circuit City, and they told me I had 10 or 14 days (I forget which) to return it. I loaded Debian 3.0 on it. I haven't started looking at sound or apm yet, but everything else (including X) is working fine.
It came with restore disks, so I can restore it to its out-of-the-box state.

What I meant to say was, yeah, that was a completely pointless site to go to. Along the theme of it though, if you're (seriously) looking for a *nix laptop of some type, you really, really need to take a look at Apple's Powerbooks.

Feel free to mark me -1, Redundant, but Apple's laptops are probably the best in the industry hardware/design wise, run cooler than most x86 boxes, have faster chips that most PC laptops, and run a full-fledged *nix operating system, with a big giant company and a growing user base to support it.

If you're willing to open your mind (and your pocketbook a little - but come on, you're buying a laptop!) it's hard to go wrong with one of those.

>>>--From my web server statistics (data are from April 2002) I know, which manufacturers are most looked up for Linux purposes. Please keep in mind that this is a very rough estimation about their Linux popularity and doesn't tell anything about a laptop fitting a specific purpose. -->>>

Does this site have anything more than very rough estimates or is it just me? On to the next story.

I have a recient iBook that dual boots Debain and OS X. There are a bunch of distros that I can think of off the top of my head that work on it: LinuxPPC [linuxppc.com] [defunct?], Debian [debian.org], Yellow Dog Linux [yellowdoglinux.com] [Red Hat based], and SuSE [suse.com]. The dual boot setup is pretty easy for those with linux experience, a guid is available here [ibooklinux.net]. I have to give Apple props for the case design, among other things. My only complaints are the 8meg ATI Rage 128 Mobility [it lags a bit] and a soft modem which is unusable under Linux. I got the AirPort card to work {kernel compile), but the lack of a modem irks me because in having a laptop portability is a must and that includes having a working modem. Overall I am happy with my purchase, BUT a PowerBook G4 would be nice... Oh yeah, when you buy an Apple you avoid the Microsoft Tax completely (and it comes with a nice *NIX preinstaled too!) =)

I'm somewhat actively looking for a laptop to run Linux, but I've found the various websites mentioned to be far from useful. It seems that laptop models change about every three months or so.

For instance: I looked at CompUSA selling an HP Pavilion zt1250 [compusa.com]. I haven't found any linux/laptop site which mentions this model. Not only this, but HP's website has no listing for this model at all, not even an historical reference.

I get the feeling that, as a general rule, by the time someone gets Linux up and running on a new model, that model is no longer being manufactured.

A lot of pages I find about running linux on a laptop tend to say things like: works great out of the box, except for sound, X, modem, network, and power management.

That is so true. It seems that laptop vendors change model numbers for no apparent reason. I've seen a few HP Pavilion's that *seem* to have the same hardware, but different model numbers. Perhaps the differences are in the installed software.

I did get Debian Sid running on a Pavilion ze1115. Everything worked 'out of the box', except ACPI. I was able to get that working with the latest patches from Sourceforge. The whole process was far easier that I had anticipated.

Rocks, 99% of the hardware works with little or no special attention after a RH 7.2 install. Battery life is a little less it seems but when I need Linux on the laptop its for network diagnostics and usually I solve a problem there quite quickly. Dual booting with XP via GRUB... I'm quite impressed, any questions?

Unlike many others, I have not had such luck with laptop installation. My greatest problem occured yesterday. I installed Mandrake 8.2 on a Sony Vaio PCG-FXA53. First I tryed fixing some Xwindows problems, but on reboot, the laptop died. It now refuses to turn on what so ever. It exhibits no power confirmation from either battery or a wall outlet. The laptop was designed for XP, so I guess that is my problem. I'm actually assuming that the problem is concerning ACPI. I hope to get it replaced today, but Im afraid of telling them I put linux on it. Whether its cable modem companys or resellers, most places refuse to deal with your product if a non-windows OS has touched it.

They're one of the few laptop companies that not only have their shit together, but keep their shit together. I recently made the jump from Toshiba; a jump urged all the faster because of their indifference to some concerns I had with their adoption of the Legacy Free BIOS design. Bad.

Anyhow, I'm about a month into owning my spanking new Dell Inspiron 8200, which runs Quake III like a dream by the way. Even at 1600x1200 res with everything enabled. Presently working my way through various System Shock 2 levels. This notebook does not disappoint. So very highly recommended.

Wow, nothing but slams for the mobilix page. However, I recently found it very helpful getting an HP 800CT working. Sure, that page that was linked in the story wasn't all that memorable, but I think it's a worthy site.

As for the Windows tax on laptops, I suggest buying refurbished models. Where I've gotten mine (including that HP 800CT), they seem to have two tiers of laptops. The higher cost ones have relatively recent hardware and come with Windows 98 or more recent, and the lower cost ones - about $200 to $500 - have older procesors like Pentiums and don't include an OS. (OK, there's DOS on the drive, but no Windows.)

If you write me, I'll be happy to tell you their URL, though curiously, their laptop stock seems quite low right now.

Linux on a laptop is a great idea, I have Suse 7.3 running on a Dell Inspirion 2500, with KDE 3.0 on it. Had to do a little configuring with X though before it would work. Once that was solved everything worked except for the (win)modem. I love it.

I've been getting a bit annoyed with linux recently and the fact linux had a heck of a struggle with my fujitsu-siemens amilo when i bought it pushed me towards FreeBSD.

Initially I tried FreeBSD 5.0 developer-priview 1, which seemed to support *ALL* the hardware on the laptop - nic, usb, pcmcia, gfx, modem, firewire, etc. but then i discovered enlightenment didn't want to play ball, so i tried 4.6-pre.

It worked, but hardware support is flaky. However, it gave me a good reason to learn a lot more about FreeBSD as an os, and for the first time got me hacking around in the kernel (which is a heck of a lot simpler to understand than linux 2.4 kernel). Since then i've managed to get most of the hardware going with the exception of APM and firewire (which I have nothing to test it with yet)

It's an experience I'd recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about the inner workings of a unix kernel and doesn't mind getting their hands dirty so to speak.